MERCOLA: “VACCINATIONS”

Dr. Sanford Pinna | Oct 16, 2012 | 0 comments

Tags: European Medicines Agency, featured, Food and Drug Administration, Gardasil, HPV, HPV vaccine, Human papillomavirus, Rick Perry, United States

New Evidence Demolishes Claims of Safety and Effectiveness of HPV Vaccine

October 16 2012

By Dr. Mercola

Dr. Pinna says…

The greatest achievements of medicine have been

through vaccinations. One century ago, millions died or were

crippled with Small Pox, Tetanus, and less from Measles, Mumps

Rubella and Polio.

Small Pox is no longer on the planet because the entire world

was vaccinated. Polio is an absolute rarity. Tetanus is no longer

the universal threat.

ARTICLE FROM DR. MERCOLA

There are currently two HPV vaccines on the market, but if there was any regard for sound scientific evidence, neither would be promoted as heavily as they are.

The first, Gardasil, was licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006. It is now recommended as a routine vaccination for girls and women between the ages of 9-26 in the US. On October 25, 2011, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices also voted to recommend giving the HPV vaccine to males between the ages of 11 and 21. The second HPV vaccine, Cervarix, was licensed in 2009.

Were it to be discovered that the HPV vaccine, in fact, does not effectively prevent cancer, then young women (and now boys) are being exposed to clearly unacceptable health risks. And that’s precisely what a recent study has concluded…

Review of HPV Trials Conclude Effectiveness is Still Completely Unproven

Published online on September 24,¹ a systematic review of pre- and post-licensure trials of the HPV vaccine by a Canadian team shows that its effectiveness is not only overstated (through the use of selective reporting or “cherry picking” data) but also completely unproven.

The summary states it quite clearly:

“We carried out a systematic review of HPV vaccine pre- and post-licensure trials to assess the evidence of their effectiveness and safety. We find that HPV vaccine clinical trials design, and data interpretation of both efficacy and safety outcomes, were largely inadequate. Additionally, we note evidence of selective reporting of results from clinical trials (i.e., exclusion of vaccine efficacy figures related to study subgroups in which efficacy might be lower or even negative from peer-reviewed publications).

Given this, the widespread optimism regarding HPV vaccines long-term benefits appears to rest on a number of unproven assumptions (or such which are at odd with factual evidence) and significant misinterpretation of available data.

For example, the claim that HPV vaccination will result in approximately 70% reduction of cervical cancers is made despite the fact that the clinical trials data have not demonstrated to date that the vaccines have actually prevented a single case of cervical cancer (let alone cervical cancer death), nor that the current overly optimistic surrogate marker-based extrapolations are justified.

Likewise, the notion that HPV vaccines have an impressive safety profile is only supported by highly flawed design of safety trials and is contrary to accumulating evidence from vaccine safety surveillance databases and case reports which continue to link HPV vaccination to serious adverse outcomes (including death and permanent disabilities).

We thus conclude that further reduction of cervical cancers might be best achieved by optimizing cervical screening (which carries no such risks) and targeting other factors of the disease rather than by the reliance on vaccines with questionable efficacy and safety profiles.” [Emphasis mine]

It is truly mindboggling, and a true testament to the conflicts of interest manipulating public health guidelines, that the HPV vaccine has received such robust backing by health officials and legislators alike.

Back in 2007, just a year after Gardasil’s introduction to the market, Texas Governor Rick Perry went so far as signing an executive order mandating sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated against HPV. Not surprisingly, Perry’s former chief of staff was then a Merck lobbyist. Fortunately, the Legislature subsequently overturned his order.

It’s important to realize that the HPV vaccine only protects against a small select set of HPV viruses that can lead to cell abnormalities that in some instances can cause cervical cancer, if the abnormalities are not identified and treated. So in reality, it’s a misnomer to call it an anti-cancer vaccine. And it’s massively misleading, if not a deliberate deception, to claim it “will” save lives.

Today, six years after licensure, we STILL have absolutely no proof, not a shred of actual evidence, indicating that Gardasil actually prevents cancer in the long-term and/or reduces cervical cancer mortality. What we have instead, is tens of thousands of adverse event reports and 122 deaths, as of mid-August.

Media Reports on Merck Study, But Ignores Canadian Review

What makes this issue so infuriating is the complete lack of transparency about the potential risks of the vaccine. Just days after the online release of the featured Canadian review, which obliterates claims of both safety and effectiveness, the Wall Street Journal² reported that:

“A new study of Merck and Co’s Gardasil cervical-cancer vaccine showed it was associated with fainting on the day of inoculation and skin infections two weeks afterward, but no link with more serious health problems was found. …The Gardasil study – led by the Kaiser Permanente Vaccine Study Center in Oakland, California – was required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency to provide an additional look at the vaccine’s safety in a large group of people. It was funded by Merck.

…More than 200 categories of illnesses such as asthma, diabetes, nervous-system disorders and medical conditions such as attention deficit disorder, back pain and other injuries were reviewed. In most cases the condition existed before the vaccine was given. There were 14 deaths recorded among girls and women in the study but the causes, including car accidents, congenital heart problems, suicide, lupus and pneumonia, weren’t linked to the vaccine…”

There’s not a single mention of the Canadian review. Likewise, WebMD’s HPV page,³ which was reviewed by Kimball Johnson, MD on August 13, 2012, plainly states:

“No serious HPV vaccine side effects have been found, although fainting spells following injection have been reported in teens and young adults. Sometimes soreness occurs at the injection site.”

This kind of blatant hiding of potential adverse effects leaves me speechless… Where is the journalistic integrity and accountability? WebMD is the second most visited health web site on the entire web (Mercola.com is fourth), so to say they have an influence over the health choices made by the average US citizen would be an understatement. The general belief is that it’s a first-rate, trustworthy source of “independent and objective” information about health, but as I reported two years ago, the site is in fact heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry.

The HPV Vaccine Risks You’re Not Being Told About

As of August 13, 2012, VAERS has received 119 reports of death following HPV vaccination,⁴ as well as:

894 reports of disability
517 life-threatening adverse events
9,889 emergency room visits
2,781 hospitalizations

And WebMD had the gall to misinform the public by stating that there have been NO serious side effects associated with HPV vaccination! What parent would not consider even the remote potential for permanent disability and/or death worthy of at least a brief mention?

Recent data pulled by VAERS research analyst Janny Stokvis⁵ also show a dramatic and recent increase in abnormal pap smears, cervical dysplasia, and cervical cancer following HPV vaccination.

Bear in mind that cervical cancer typically does not strike until your late 40′s. According to 2005 -2009 data by the National Cancer Institute,⁶ the median age at diagnosis for cervical cancer in the US is 48. Only 0.2 percent of those diagnosed with cervical cancer were under the age 20, so it’s quite rare in this age group. It is estimated that 12,170 American women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2012,⁷ so statistically only 2,434 women under the age of 20 would be diagnosed with cervical cancer. Because we’re dealing with relatively low numbers to begin with, it makes the rapid increases detailed below all the more worrisome – especially when you consider that the vaccine is supposed to REDUCE cancer incidence.

The following data is for girls ages 14 to 26.⁸ According to Stokvis, some of the reports of cervical abnormalities are occurring four to five years after HPV vaccination, so we’re just now starting to see some of the longer-term ramifications, since the vaccine has only been on the market for six years.

	March 2011	March 2012	% increase in 12 months
Abnormal pap smear	384	479	24.74 %
Cervical dysplasia	138	190	37.68 %
Cervical cancer	41	50	21.95 %

This new data supports previous suspicions that the HPV vaccine might actually increase your risk of cervical cancer. I wrote about this two years ago. The information came straight from Merck and was presented to the FDA prior to approval.⁹ According to Merck’s own research, if you have been exposed to HPV 16 or 18 prior to injection and take the vaccine, you increase your risk of precancerous lesions, or worse, by 44.6 percent…

Additionally, since Merck’s research indicates Gardasil may also ‘provide cross-protection’ against other strains of HPV that are closely related to HPV 16 and 18 (two of the four strains included in the vaccine), this would mean prior exposure to these additional strains (which are not included in the vaccine itself) may pose an additional increased risk for cervical cancer when combined with vaccination.

As of August 13, 2012, more than 27,023 adverse event reports¹⁰ have been filed with the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS),¹¹ including 918 reports from boys and men between the ages of nine and 44, who were given HPV shots. Keep in mind that it is estimated that only between one and 10 percent of serious events, which occur after vaccination, are ever reported to VAERS.¹²^{, 13}

In addition, FDA researchers revealed in 2009 that nearly 70 percent of Gardasil vaccine adverse events reported to VAERS came from Merck, which indicates that the majority of doctors are reporting vaccine-related injuries and deaths directly to Merck instead of to VAERS.¹⁴ Who knows how many of the Gardasil-related injuries and deaths never make it from Merck’s files to the VAERS database.

Adverse events reported to VAERS post-HPV vaccination include:

Bell’s Palsy	Guillain-Barre Syndrome	Seizures
Paralysis	Blindness	Pancreatitis
Speech problems	Short term memory loss	Ovarian cysts
Blood clotting and heart problems	Miscarriages¹⁵ and fetal abnormalities	Cardiac arrest¹⁶ and sudden death

Large-Scale Study Shows HPV Vaccine is Ineffective and Increases Rate of Carcinogeic HPV Types in Vaccinated Women

The featured study alone is big news, but that’s not all. Other damning studies have also been completely ignored by media and public health officials alike. As reported by menstruationresearch.org in June:¹⁷

“In January 2012, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology published the ATHENA HPV study¹⁸ announcing the results of a large cervical cancer screening trial, enrolling 47,208 women 21 years of age or older at 61 clinical sites throughout the United States. The authors reported that in a sub group of 12,852 young women, the HPV vaccine reduced HPV-16 infections only 0.6% in vaccinated women vs. unvaccinated women.

Most disturbing are the data that showed other high-risk HPV infections were diagnosed in vaccinated women 2.6% to 6.2% more frequently than unvaccinated women. In fact, the study reported that the increased rate of infections by carcinogenic HPV types in vaccinated women (other than those targeted by Gardasil®) is four to 10 times higher than the reduction in HPV 16/18 infections.”

Yet another recent British study¹⁹ published in the journal Vaccine on May 14, 2012, states:

“Estimates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine impact in clinical trials and modeling studies rely on DNA tests of cytology or biopsy specimens to determine the HPV type responsible for a cervical lesion. DNA of several oncogenic HPV types may be detectable in a specimen. However, only one type may be responsible for a particular cervical lesion.

Misattribution of the causal HPV type for a particular abnormality may give rise to an apparent increase in disease due to non-vaccine HPV types following vaccination (‘unmasking’)… There could be an apparent maximum increase of 3-10% in long-term cervical cancer incidence due to non-vaccine HPV types following vaccination…Unmasking may be an important phenomenon in HPV post-vaccination epidemiology, in the same way that has been observed following pneumococcal conjugate vaccination.” [Emphasis mine]

Talk to Your Kids about HPV and Gardasil

There are far better ways to protect yourself or your young daughters against cervical cancer than getting Gardasil or Cervarix vaccinations, and it’s important you let your children know this. Remember, in more than 90 percent of cases, your immune system can clear up the HPV infection within two years on its own, so keeping your immune system strong is important.

In addition, HPV infection is spread through sexual contact and research²⁰ has demonstrated that using condoms can reduce your risk of HPV infection by 70 percent, which is far more effective than the HPV vaccine! Be sure your kids know that this infection is sexually transmitted, so the risk of infection can be greatly reduced by lifestyle choices, including the use of condoms. Also let them know that, even if they get vaccinated, it is important that girls and women are screened every few years for cervical changes that may indicate pre-cancerous lesions because there is little guarantee that either Gardasil or Cervarix will prevent cervical cancer..